Last week I learned something very interesting about the way Linux allocates and manages memory by default out of the box.| Ops Monkey
We did a lot of work in the BIOS of our machines last week. Doing BIOS edits by hand sucks, there's got to be a better way than connecting...| opsmonkey.blogspot.com
Yesterday I solved a problem that had been vexing me for more than a week. I am helping a client load test an application using Apache Solr. (JDK 1.6.0_14, Solr version 1.4.1 which uses Lucene 2.9.3).| Ops Monkey
Recently I was working with a client to support a text-search type functionality on their website. Given a search category and a list of words, the app was to return the highest relevancy titles that matched those words. For purposes of demonstration, assume the ranking was simple, using only an "or" search on the list of words. (So for example, a search of "Green tea" would match return all titles that matched "Green" or "Tea", and relevancy scoring didn't need to take into account if mo...| Ops Monkey
This information is specific to the 3Ware 9500 Series controller. (More specifically, the 9500-4LP). However, the 3Ware CLI seems to be the same for other 3Ware 9XXX controllers which I have had experience with. (The 9550 for sure)| Ops Monkey
We run a lot of Supermicro H8DAR-T motherboards in production. These are the BIOS settings that work well for us. I have not done a lot of tweaking trying to get more performance out of our systems with BIOS settings, since stability is key.| Ops Monkey
The Supermicro H8DAR-T motherboard comes in (at least) two flavors. The differences that I know about between the two versions are:| Ops Monkey
Recently when debugging some performance issues on a client's site, I came across some very interesting behavior. Some users were reporting that the site performed very well for a short period of time, but after a while, performance became very poor, enough so to render the site unusable. Checking the apache logfiles for the IP addreses of those clients showed that the requests themselves were not taking an unusual amount of time, but instead the requests were coming into the webserver ...| Ops Monkey
I've recently been using the powerful mod_rewrite to modify the URL's on a client's website. mod_rewrite is a powerful tool that lets you turn "ugly" URL's like| Ops Monkey
Due to some very favorable benchmarking results, I am planning to migrate some of our production databases to Myqsl5 on Nexenta. Previously the database was running on a Debian Linux server, and the I/O subsystem performed much worse on that system.| Ops Monkey
Here's a post I just entered on the Nexenta/gnusolaris Beginners Forum that has some good info about ZFS. Apparently the formatting got eaten on the mailing list so I'm reposting it here:| Ops Monkey
Today I needed to modify a nexenta Alpha-6 install ISO. There were several things I needed to fix.| Ops Monkey
We're working on some fault tolerant delpoyments of debian linux systems. It turns out that this is available in the stock debian kernel (sarge) and luckily, in the custom kernel we'd built at a later time.| Ops Monkey
The following is a patch against apache 2.0.54 (Probably applies clean to other versions, I've applied it to 2.0.55 also). It's built for debian linux, it's possible that some hacking may be necessary to get it to apply to a vanilla version of httpd but I doubt it. Copy the attached patch to a file called for example, 000_ProxyMultiSource.| Ops Monkey
Our latest fight with linux has been to get a machine with multiple connections to the internet via different circiuts to pass traffic correctly. The machine is a web proxy which will bind the socket to a specific source address to round-robin the trafic across the two networks. This would be way useful for a company to effectively "bind" a few low-bandwidth links (dsl, t1, etc) into a higher bandwidth office proxy.| Ops Monkey
(Mirroring this for posterity in case Svens ever forgets to pay his yahoo hosting bill :-) )| Ops Monkey
This week I've played around with Nexenta. This is a neat operating system. It is basically a "distribution" of OpenSolaris, using debian-like package management system, built on the Ubuntu "Dapper Drake" release. Fortunately, it just happened to support all of the pieces of hardware in the test system, a Supermicro H8DAR-T, with Broadcom ethernet and a Marvell88 based onboard SATA2 controller.| Ops Monkey